The Myth of the Breeze

The Lobsterman’s Trap

It takes a lob­ster­man as tough as Deer Isle’s Julie Eaton to make it through the Maine win­ter and a sea­son of record low lob­ster prices.

Words and Images by Aubrey White

Julie Eaton mar­ried her hus­band for his “wicked firm bot­tom.” She wets her thin lips at its very men­tion, clenches her jaw and inhales sharply through closed teeth. Julie didn’t marry Sid­ney Eaton until 38, and the tar­di­ness of romance has left her libidi­nous as a teenager. But her brash tone may serve another purpose—helping her find a place amongst men. In tak­ing the Eaton name, Julie mar­ried into a boun­teous ocean bot­tom, a ter­ri­to­ri­ally rigid lob­ster­ing ground, and an indus­try dom­i­nated by men. She has no birthright to fish these waters off the coast of Deer Isle, Maine. Born on the main­land, her access to Deer Isle’s lob­ster was strictly con­tin­gent upon her behav­ior as an out­sider want­ing in. After twenty years of lob­ster­ing and seven years on these grounds, she is quick to cor­rect any mis­nomer. Dri­ving her boat, the ‘Cat­sass’ out to sea, mascara-clad eyes squint­ing at the sun­rise, a 100 cig­a­rette dan­gling from her mouth, Julie declares, “I’m not a lob­ster­woman or a lob­ster­lady.” She exhales a puff of smoke. “I’m a lob­ster­man. I’ve earned that, you know. I do just what the boys do. I’ve earned that.”

In her orange oil slicks and black waders, Julie epit­o­mizes the image of the lob­ster­man: gruff, fear­lessly inde­pen­dent, wary of and vic­tim to a legion of reg­u­la­tions that threaten her species. If you ask Julie how she prefers to spend her time, you’ll likely hear one of two answers: on the water or in bed with Sid. Like so many oth­ers who take to the water, the thought of report­ing to a boss or shuf­fling paper rep­re­sents the dredges of labor.

And we as con­sumers are obsessed with the image she con­jures. You have to won­der, is it really the fla­vor of lob­ster we’re infat­u­ated with, or more the idyll of ocean free­dom and the self-employed? The back­drop of Julie’s daily work is per­haps the most beau­ti­ful you could ask for—a scat­ter­ing of rocky out­crop­pings and lush green islands across the hori­zon that even­tu­ally merge into main­land. Of course, most of us choose health insur­ance and a 401K in lieu of the open seas. But Julie, now 45, thinks the oppo­site: “There’s not retire­ment, there’s no, you know, ben­e­fits that way. I don’t [ever] plan on retir­ing, so I guess I don’t need retire­ment.” Sid, 65, also shows no signs of slow­ing down.

For Julie, the free­dom defies the need for secu­rity.  But if you really look at it, the lob­ster­ing life is bound by rope and buoy to one thing: the mar­ket. At the end of every day, Julie sells her lob­sters to the same buy­ing sta­tion for what­ever price is offered. And with this, the sec­ond year of national reces­sion, Julie gar­ners the painfully low price of $2.70 per pound.

But isn’t lob­ster is an expen­sive del­i­cacy, a lux­ury item that con­notes cel­e­bra­tion and pros­per­ity? Seafood restau­rant giant Red Lob­ster recently con­ducted a poll declar­ing that four out of ten men and women still con­sider lob­ster the most roman­tic meal to have when pop­ping the ques­tion. Crack­ing shells and slurp­ing the meat from lob­ster claws is sexy and screams of a pros­per­ous future with your mate.

Julie’s seen the menus. “Lob­ster salad, mar­ket price. Lob­ster chow­der, mar­ket price. Well, I know what mar­ket price is. I sell to the mar­ket. ‘Hey, honey, mar­ket price. Let’s have lob­ster din­ners. We’ll have six lob­sters apiece. That’s $2.70 a pound.’ They’re like, ‘no no no, mar­ket price is $21.99’… how do you jus­tify that? We’re get­ting paid $2.70, they’re being trucked down the road, across the road, and they’re $21.99. Add an ear of corn and a baked potato, there you go,” she says. “Who the hell’s mar­ket was that? Because it cer­tainly wasn’t mine.”

So what hap­pens between Julie’s $2.70 per pound and the pricey lob­ster din­ners where break­ing the chest cav­ity of a steam­ing bug is inter­rupted by a man on one knee ask­ing for his lover’s hand in marriage?

If you ask Julie where her lob­sters go after being sold to the dealer, she’ll tell you she doesn’t know. If you ask a worker at her buy­ing sta­tion, his answer is not much dif­fer­ent. “[We] weigh ‘em up, take ‘em up, they go right in the tank…they grade ‘em…They ship ‘em out.”

Once off Julie’s boat, lob­ster can meet a vari­ety of fates. Some are trucked off Deer Isle and taken to restau­rants in Boston, or all the way to JFK air­port in New York City. Ship­ments as heavy as a ton leave JFK daily, bound for cities as far as Los Ange­les or even Europe. Other lob­sters are sent to pro­cess­ing facil­i­ties in Canada. Some sit in ocean cages, or lob­ster pounds, wait­ing for buyers.

Though they leave the lobsterman’s hands at barely $3 a pound, dis­trib­u­tors sell to restau­rants at around $7 per pound plus the costs of ship­ping. Restau­rants fac­tor in the cost of labor and lux­ury and call it mar­ket price. At the high-end seafood restau­rant Boston Legal, a one-and-a-half pound lob­ster, “shipped from the boat to the restau­rant,” is $39.95.

But the lob­ster prices at the gro­cery store are remark­ably cheap—as low as $5.99 a pound in Maine’s Han­naford mar­kets. In either case, the true cost of lob­ster goes unrep­re­sented. Lob­ster­men like Julie see noth­ing of expen­sive restau­rant prices. And the low prices she receives, trans­lated into cheap lob­ster in tiny tanks at gro­cery stores, barely cover her costs.

On a day near­ing the end of the lob­ster­ing sea­son, Julie brought in 130 pounds of lob­ster. That’s about $350 gross profit. $150 of that goes towards fuel and bait each day. At the begin­ning of Octo­ber, Julie strug­gles more and more with bring­ing her catch in before sun­set. To help her end the days a bit more swiftly, a dis­tant cousin serves as Julie’s stern­woman. Julie pays her $100 for the day, leav­ing Julie with $100, barely enough to cover the wear and tear on the boat, let alone an hourly wage. With a month left to fish this sea­son, each day’s catch looks just as grim.

As Julie and Sid pull their traps from the water for the final time this sea­son, their earn­ings are $55,000 shy of last year’s. With an income source that dis­ap­pears with the warm weather, the pri­or­ity rests on pre-paying for the win­ter. Julie and Sid pay their bills a year in advance, drain their bank accounts of almost every­thing in order to stock up. “[I buy] every­thing that I can pos­si­bly buy a year ahead so that when we’re all done fish­ing, the oil bar­rel is full, so we know we’ll have heat. Our pantry is stocked, along with any other cub­by­hole I can tuck any­thing into, so I know that we’re gonna eat.” Their pantry is filled with five-pound bags of pasta and stewed toma­toes; stacked in the spare bed­room are pal­lets of canned goods and root beer.

“This year, like most fish­er­men, we won’t have any­thing extra. It’s just, it’s a total fight with both of us fish­ing just to break even.” This year the loss in rev­enue has meant their house pay­ment is cov­ered for only six months, leav­ing them won­der­ing how to earn the rest before next year’s sea­son begins.

***

Julie’s fought plenty to make a liv­ing. At the age of 23, she stud­ied aero­nau­ti­cal sci­ence with dreams of becom­ing a pilot. Just before those dreams came to fruition, she was struck by a cement truck while dri­ving to work in a wretched snow­storm. After sev­eral comatose months, Julie faced a long recov­ery to bring back her abil­ity to speak, her abil­ity to walk prop­erly, and her mem­ory. After a year of inten­sive ther­apy at her par­ents’ house, Julie found her­self ready to leave. “Now, whether I was actu­ally ready or not, it’s hard to tell…When I cut the apron strings I prob­a­bly had the men­tal abil­ity of a 16 year-old…But I was in a body much older than that, so, I did it…Somehow I needed that to keep growing.”

To keep grow­ing, Julie started to fish. Liv­ing on the island of Vinal­haven, Maine for eight years, Julie learned to lob­ster from locals while liv­ing in a small boathouse lack­ing both heat and run­ning water. “A lot of times it would be colder in the win­ter in my boat house than it would be out­side because it held the cold… It was just bru­tal. But I sur­vived it and I learned so much about what I need, and what I want.”

Today, the pull of the lob­ster indus­try leaves Julie and Sid with lives revolv­ing around their traps. Their home, a double-wide pre­fab with ocean décor through­out, is far from Deer Isle’s tourist-inundated town of Ston­ing­ton; it is tucked away from the beaten path of art gal­leries and bed and break­fasts. The shore­line is reserved for those with sum­mer homes and, accord­ing to Julie, those who com­plain about the sound of boat engines in the early morn­ing. Dur­ing fish­ing sea­son, Julie and Sid rise around 6:00 am to check the weather and watch for wind as the sun comes up. Julie pre­pares a 44-ounce mug of cof­fee and they leave their house by 7:00 am.

Nei­ther eats break­fast; nei­ther brings a lunch. They work through the day with only the catch on their minds. It isn’t until after they’ve sold their lob­ster, parked the boat, and returned home that they both real­ize how fam­ished they’ve become. Julie serves up heap­ing plates of Amer­i­can chop suey, a cheap way for both to take in the day’s calo­ries in a sin­gle meal. Dur­ing the lob­ster sea­son, each loses about 40 pounds, only to put it back come winter.

Julie gen­er­ally lob­sters alone aboard her boat, and Sid aboard his. Work­ing apart helps dou­ble their house­hold income, but also allows each to cap­tain their own boat. When the two first mar­ried, Sid asked Julie to serve as stern­man for his boat. “To which I replied, smil­ing, ‘Hell no.’ And I said to him, ‘Would you like to stern for me?’ And he smiled at me and said ‘Not a chance in hell.’”

But the two are bound together by fish­ing. Julie shares, fondly, the line that made her fall for Sid. “Come aboard dear. And make yer dory fast.” Trans­la­tion: Come aboard dear, and tie your dingy up next to mine. A man at a seafood restau­rant can kneel and impress a mate with the lux­ury of a lob­ster, but it takes the lan­guage of the sea to win a fel­low fisherman.

***

So, aboard her own boat, but with fre­quent con­ver­sa­tions over the two-way radio with Sid, Julie hauls her traps each day through the sum­mer and early fall. Hoist­ing the traps to the rail­ing, swing­ing each around ninety degrees to reach the bungee cord latch, Julie sorts her catch. Few traps con­tain more than a cou­ple of wor­thy lob­sters. Most are too small. Some are actu­ally Peeky­toe crabs. A few are female lob­sters filled with eggs. Julie remarks that with each of these preg­nant lob­sters, you can gaze into the future. And though today’s catch is dim, the future looks bright.

The grounds Julie fishes are not only “wicked firm,” they’re also healthy and well man­aged. “We cul­ti­vate them, our lob­sters, like they cul­ti­vate pota­toes,” Julie says. “We’re very pro­tec­tive of our egged females [and] our lit­tle lobsters…90% of the lob­sters I [catch] I throw over­board.” Maine fish­er­men oper­ate under strict reg­u­la­tions to only take lob­sters of appro­pri­ate size, to leave larger breed­ers in the water, and to toss back preg­nant females.

With reg­u­la­tions long in place, the fish­ery has grown to noth­ing shy of fer­tile. Julie and oth­ers are proud of their prac­tices, and her atti­tude towards new reg­u­la­tions and those who cre­ate them is quite sim­ple: “They don’t want to know what we have to say… They’ve made up their mind, and this is the way it’s gonna be.” To Julie and fel­low lob­ster­men, their longevity and his­tory in these parts speaks to one cen­tral point—these are our grounds and we can take care of them just fine.

Ted Ames, oper­a­tor of Deer Isle’s lob­ster hatch­ery, calls the lob­ster fish­ery the health­i­est in New Eng­land. “So today when you have ground­fish and other shell­fish col­laps­ing,” he says, “the lob­ster fish­ery just keeps get­ting big­ger and bigger.”

The hatch­ery that Ames oper­ates was an ini­tia­tive of Deer Isle’s local lob­ster­men, who observed low­ered pop­u­la­tions in areas and sought a solu­tion to eco­log­i­cal dam­age. The hatch­ery raises lob­ster in a safe envi­ron­ment until their sur­vival rates are steady, releas­ing the babies (barely an inch long) into the more rav­aged ocean bot­toms around the island. Ames calls their work a ‘band-aid’ that serves to pro­tect the area’s ecosys­tem more than the lob­ster mar­ket. The hatch­ery itself is an anom­aly in Maine, one of few sites where fish­er­men actively pushed for resource renewal.

But if you look closely at this island’s steps to for­tify its ocean, you’ll dis­cover with it what may be the industry’s Achilles heel. “We’re our own worst enemy,” says Ames. In fol­low­ing reg­u­la­tions, in cul­ti­vat­ing a healthy fish­ery, the indus­try has nearly out­grown itself. Accord­ing to Ames, “there’s so many lob­sters that they can’t sell [them] fast enough.”

By her esti­mates, Julie caught more lob­ster this year than in any pre­vi­ous year. Accord­ing to the owner of one of Deer Isle’s whole­sale lob­ster deal­ers, his incom­ing stock was up this year. The state of Maine is con­fi­dent enough in the fishery’s health that they’ve ini­ti­ated the process to assess and cer­tify the state’s stock as sustainable.

See­ing such low prices at the buy­ing sta­tion, the only way for Julie to make a liv­ing is to increase her catch. It is cap­i­tal­ism at its best—the tread­mill that forces you to keep run­ning faster or get off. So the logic seems to make sense: by keep­ing pop­u­la­tions up, they can keep catch­ing more, keep sell­ing more, and make a bet­ter liv­ing. But the trou­ble is cycli­cal: catch­ing too many lob­sters will flood the mar­ket; too few may leave fish­er­men parched.

***

With money as tight as it is this sea­son, the idea of catch­ing even one fewer lob­ster or set­ting one fewer trap may seem sui­ci­dal. Accord­ing to Ames, that scal­ing back is exactly what fish­er­men need to do to sur­vive. “The indus­try is really hav­ing to look at itself. One of the things that they have to deal with is: are we get­ting too big? Are we becom­ing the ele­phant in the gar­den?… The price of fuel has sky rock­eted. Bait prices have sky rock­eted. They’re pre­dict­ing that next year there won’t be enough bait to go around at all. And these guys have to look them­selves in the mir­ror and say, wait a minute, this is not the way to run a business.”

Ames’ sug­ges­tions are for fish­er­men to hold back, to pro­tect the mar­ket by fish­ing less in the sum­mer, leav­ing more lob­sters to catch in the fall and win­ter. Reduce traps, rein it in, main­tain a small indus­try despite a fecund supply.

Antic­i­pat­ing fuel and bait hikes, low­ered lob­sters prices, and an alto­gether shaky mar­ket, Julie and Sid started cut­ting back three years ago. “[Sid] and I have already cut our gear in half from what we’re allowed to fish. We each fish four hun­dred [traps]… We take as lit­tle bait as pos­si­ble to do the job. We don’t waste it, not a fish. We’ve already done the cut­ting back and are hav­ing one hell of a struggle.”

As for Julie fish­ing the win­ter, leav­ing the house is dif­fi­cult enough; the open ocean is out of the ques­tion. But if fish­er­men were reg­u­lated to catch into the win­ter, those aboard small, uncov­ered boats would be out of busi­ness, replaced by boats with larger crews and the capac­ity to han­dle the weather and off-shore win­ter lobstering.

For Julie, the needed change comes back to the restau­rant. “The only way that we’re going to be able to keep sup­ply­ing restau­rants is for them to be able to work with us. Or they won’t get the prod­uct period, because we won’t be able to go [fishing]…We’re not ask­ing for a hand­out, we’re ask­ing for a fair shake.” If the mar­ket price at restau­rants fails to reflect Julie’s real­ity, she fears the fishermen’s only solu­tion is a tie up—a full-on strike to freeze the market.

Julie‘s and Ames’ solu­tions seem dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent. Ames sug­gests pro­tect­ing the lob­ster as a lux­ury, Julie wants to see it sold at more acces­si­ble prices to increase its sales. For Ames, the solu­tion rests in the hands of fish­er­men. Julie sees her hands as tied. Even with efforts to con­serve, Julie and Sid are left won­der­ing how to make it through next year if the mar­ket fails to improve.

There is, how­ever, com­mon ground between these two diver­gent per­spec­tives. If Julie and Sid are among few fish­er­men who make those cut­backs, they may con­tinue to strug­gle. But if the fish­ing com­mu­nity con­serves together, they may cre­ate a col­lec­tive impact.

The lob­ster­ing indus­try can func­tion as a “strong eco­nomic engine” when it’s healthy. Fish­er­men return their prof­its to their com­mu­ni­ties and help them thrive. “In a fish­ing com­mu­nity, if the fish­er­men hurt, every­body hurts. You know the shop­keep­ers hurt, the gas sta­tions hurt. The plumbers, the elec­tri­cians have no work because nobody can afford to do any­thing. Every­body hurts if the fish­er­men hurt.” And in a year when fish­er­men are leav­ing the busi­ness for eco­nomic sur­vival, the whole island feels it. Once the tourists and sum­mer res­i­dents have left, Deer Isle falls quiet.

Through­out the win­ter, only a sin­gle restau­rant stays open on Deer Isle. The Har­bor Cafe offers buy-one-get-one-free spe­cials on Mon­day nights to keep the locals com­ing in, and the line to eat is out the door. In a time of hiber­na­tion and antic­i­pa­tion of another sea­son, the cafe serves as a com­mu­nity cen­ter for fish­er­men and friends. On a lucky Mon­day you’ll find Julie there, start­ing food fights with other locals and pinch­ing the back­sides of unsus­pect­ing men.

Still, there is work to be done all through the win­ter. Back at the Eaton res­i­dence, with the first snow falling, Julie and Sid pre­pare to bear down for the win­ter: fix the boats, paint the buoys, wait for next year and hope for a change.